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10
Friendship Chelsea Buns
September 10, 2007 |
It came in the mail, packed with love and a page full of instructions, from a special person at St. Louis, Missouri.
It was the Amish Friendship bread starter that has been circulating in the blogosphere for the past few weeks. Read about it HERE and HERE.
It sat on our counter, smelling like uber-yeasty beer. On the 6th day, we fed it some milk, flour and sugar. Repeat on the 10th day. We ended up with five cups of starter. We used one cup. There’s something in the mail for four friends - Priya, Swapna, neroli, and The Cooker.
The recipe asks you to add oil, sugar, a package of pudding mix, baking soda, baking powder, vanilla extract and bake it into two loaves.
We prefer yeasted breads to those with leavening agents like baking soda. Plus, we were planning to make Chelsea buns. It had been a long time since I savoured these English tea-time treats.
The Chelsea bun was first created in the eighteenth century at the Bun House in Chelsea, an establishment favoured by Hanoverian royalty and demolished in 1839. The bun is made of a rich yeast dough flavoured with lemon peel, cinnamon or a sweet spice mixture. Prior to being rolled into a square spiral shape the dough is spread with a mixture of currants, brown sugar and butter. A sweet glaze covering is added before the rolled-up dough is sliced into individual buns and baked. The process of making this bun is very similar to that involved in producing the cinnamon roll.
(Source: Wiki)
This recipe contains milk, flour and sugar, just like our starter. So we used 1 cup of starter (which has equal parts of flour, milk and sugar), to replace 1/3 cup each of these ingredients in the recipe. The result? Lip-smacking good. The starter lent a tinge of sourness and complexity to the dough.
This post should be titled How Sticky Is Our Keyboard?
Both of us are eating these Chelsea Buns with ginger-lemongrass chai , and thanking Nupur as I type.
This is a heavily tweaked recipe from a wonderful out-of-print book by Jennie Shapter called Bread Machine: How to prepare and bake the perfect loaf. It has some elegant recipes, like the Potato-Saffron Bread we featured before.
(Makes a dozen)
Ingredients
4.5 cups unbleached bread flour/all purpose flour
**or 2.25 cups each all purpose and whole wheat flour plus 2 tsps vital gluten
1 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter at room temperature
2 tsps active dry yeast
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg
For the filling
1 tablespoon melted butter
1/2 cup each golden and dark raisins
1/4 cup white wine/vermouth/orange juice
2 tablespoons brown sugar/maple syrup (we used home-made peach preserves)
1/2 tsp ground apple pie spice (a mix of cloves, cinnamon, allspice, cardamom and nutmeg)
1 tsp grated lemon or orange zest
2 tsps chopped candied ginger (optional)
For the glaze
1/4 cup peach/apricot/orange preserves or honey
Method
1. Warm 1/3 cup milk until tepid, add the yeast and 1 teaspoon of the sugar, stir and keep aside for five minutes.
2. Add the rest of the ingredients into a bowl or bread machine container, with the salt at the bottom and the yeast mix at the top.
3. Knead until a smooth, elastic dough is formed.
4. Cover the bowl and put the dough in a warm place until it has doubled in size (about 1 1/2 hours).
5. Soak the raisins in the wine/juice for half an hour, drain, and reserve the wine/juice for the chef.
6. Punch the dough down gently and roll it into a 12×12 inch square.
7. Brush it with the melted butter, then spread the sugar or preserves.
8. Sprinkle the raisins, spices, candied ginger and citrus zest. Leave 1/2 inch on one side uncovered.
9. Roll the dough, jelly-roll fashion towards the uncovered edge.
10. Press the edges to seal and cut the roll into 12 slices.
11. Grease a 9×12 inch pan and place the rolls in them cut side up.
12. Cover the pan with an inverted baking sheet or oiled plastic wrap.
13. Keep it in a warm place for 30-45 minutes until the dough has nearly doubled in size. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400F with a rack in the middle.
14. Bake for 18-20 minutes until the buns are well-risen and evenly golden all over.
15. Let them cool a bit, invert the pan take the buns out as a single slab and keep it on a wire rack to cool some more. Take care not to press them too hard, or they will flatten.
16. When the slab is still warm, heat the preserves or honey in the microwave for 15-20 seconds and brush the top and the sides with a pastry brush.
Serve warm with a cup of coffee or tea.
Drunken Raisins
Chelsea Buns are our entry for this month’s A Fruit a Month, organised by Swapna @ Swad, where the theme is Grapes.
Also highlighting Grapes is Marta @ An Italian in the US in her Fresh Produce of the Month event. Chelsea Buns are our entry for that event as well.
- B.
Amish-Friendship-starter, Chelsea-Bun, england, milk, Raisin, vegetarian recipes, Wheat
mmmmmm they look so gorgeous. I am surely going to try them.
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